Modeling the antecedents and consequences of the customer experience in the tourism industry

Experiences play an important role in people's lives and contribute to a person's mental health. Most of these experiences take place in the activities that people do in their spare time (Tan and Chang, 2016). From a consumer’s perspective, leisure tourism can be a source of memorable experiences (Menga and Hanb, 2019). Tourism activities are considered the fourth part of human activities after agriculture, industry, and services and can be called invisible exports that can create a suitable platform for friendship and understanding between nations and peace without polluting the human environment and brought peace to the people; for this reason, tourism is also called the white industry (Rabbani et al., 2020). Tourist attractions are known as a field of study in the field of tourism. The value of these attractions is evident in the strategies that governments develop to make a benefit, as they can be mentioned as the main assets for the development of tourism destinations (Liask et al., 2013). Also, managing the tourist experience can lead to more tourists’ knowledge and their inclinations and interests, and provide grounds for attracting more tourists, which in turn can have desirable consequences in the form of the value of tourist participation. Due to the importance of the tourism industry and the expansion of studies with a managerial and practical nature in this regard, the present study has been conducted to achieve a model of antecedents and consequences of the tourist experience. For this purpose, first, the method of combining the antecedents and consequences of customer’s experience as well as the experiences of management approaches in the tourism industry (separately) was identified, and with the guidance of 10 experts and marketing and tourism experts and their opinions, and lastly, a questionnaire was prepared. 440 Iranian tourists who had traveled to Turkey, Malaysia, Azerbaijan, and the UAE in the last 5 years (1396 -1400) were distributed. In the first stage, each of the structures of the proposed model, in terms of being one-dimensional in a separate measurement model by Klein's (2005) method was investigated so that, firstly, the factor load of the indicators was more than 0.5; not more than 0.85. In the second stage, the validity and reliability of the structures were evaluated and Cronbach's alpha, structural validity (CR), mean explained variance, construct validity, convergent validity, and divergent validity were calculated and evaluated. After the assessment tools were finally approved at each stage, the research model was developed and tested. The result of the present study is to model the antecedents and consequences of the tourist experience using a mixed-method (qualitative and quantitative) which is one of the innovations of this research, which can be used by managers and industry activists and the  development of tourism-related activities on a global scale.